Spatial join layer with overlapping polygons?

Question

Hello everyone, I am trying to spatially join our city's "overlay districts" with our parcel file so that it will be displayed if a parcel is in an overlay district. However, some of the overlay districts are on top of each other. For example, a parcel can be in a C-1 zone and a historic preservation zone. I want both of these to show up in 2 different columns. Is there any way to do something like this? So the final result, the parcel would show that it is C-1 in one column and historic preservation in a second column, because the parcel overlaps both polygons.

Thanks in advance.

curtvprice · Answer

Esri recently posted a neat approach to processing your one-to-many table (the one with dupes output from select by location):

Geoprocessing Blog: Concatenate Row Values
http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/geoprocessing/archive/2011/12/09/ConcatenateRowValues.aspx

RichardFairhurst · Answer

Do a spatial join with parcels as the target feature and overlay districts as the join feature.  Join one to many using the "intersects" option.  That will give you one row for each combination of parcel and overlay district.  Then you can do some sort of pivot table to get them to show up as columns.  I believe this would work with overlapping polygons...

For the Pivot Table operation you can use the Pivot Table tool if you have an ArcInfo license.  If you don't, see my last post in this thread for an Excel table that uses an Excel pivot table and formulas to do the Pivot of actual table values from rows to columns.

LornaMurison · Answer

Do a spatial join with parcels as the target feature and overlay districts as the join feature.  Join one to many using the "intersects" option.  That will give you one row for each combination of parcel and overlay district.  Then you can do some sort of pivot table to get them to show up as columns.  I believe this would work with overlapping polygons...